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Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

I think you're missing a bit of the organization here. Let me see if I can make it clear:

A number of beekeepers in Canada own and manage hives. (Ian is one of those beekeepers). They harvest honey from their hives.

Most commercial beekeepers either bottle and market their honey themselves, or they sell their harvested honey to "packers," businesses that process and bottle ("pack") honey and sell it wholesale.

In this instance, rather than sell to an independent packer (a free-standing business), the Canadian beekeepers organized themselves, invested in the equipment to "pack" honey (the processing and bottling machinery), and hired individuals to do that work. This sort of organization is called a cooperative. The business owned and operated collectively by the members is the packer, in this case. Therefore, BeeMaid is the packer. The beekeepers who own shares in BeeMaid are the honey producers. And HACCP is the set of health and safety standards used to inspect and certify the business packing the honey.

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

I have customers who come directly to me because they want raw honey, I have customers come to me because they want comb honey. I hae customers come to me because they want honey that has not been processed in anyway, I also have customers come to me and buy some processed honey I get from my packer because they love the product and want to support me directly

I do not understand the direction Boris is taking this conversation. Consumers know what processed means. They encounter it with all foods. Its reality of our day. THe ones who actually care are the ones who come directly to me and get the good straight from the source. It takes more work doing it that way but that is the way getting raw food has always been. It is avaliable, they go find it

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

Ian, if i brought up that the Pure Honey lable was True at the club meeting they would laugh me out of the building. After you heat your honey at 161 F and filter it (pasteurized) you should feel Rediculous passing it off as a nutritional product. It can be called honey because that Was it's base product, but that's about all you can claim it is after pasteurizing it.

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

I will try to show my definition of HONEY. -Boris

Very cool exercise, I think. Concentrating and narrowing a definition in a case like this really make you consider a wide range of factors, makes you think about what should and should not be included, makes you more aware of what might or might not be included and what exceptions might have to be granted. If nothing else, creating such a definition deepens the understanding of the topic by the person who creates his definition.

For example, I got to thinking about water as a parallel to this discussion. I turn on the tap in my house, run liquid into a glass, and drink it. I refer to that liquid as "water." Now, I realize fully that it isn't pure water. It has other things in it. But it also has had things removed and added by human intervention. Call it "processing," I guess. It's pulled by machinery out of the ground, filtered, treated with chemicals to kill some organisms, and delivered by machinery through pipes to my tap. Does the process make it something other than water? I don't define it that way. I know some folks separate "tap water" from "bottled water," but, in my experience, I tend to refer to both as simply "water."

In the case of honey, does pollen have to be in it for it to be honey? How about all of the enzymes and trace amounts of various things that have been suggested above? Do trace amounts of various pesticides (as demonstrated by a number of recent research studies on pesticide residues and diseases in bees) have to be present for it to be defined currently as "honey?"

I haven't given that much thought in the past as to what is and is not "honey." I've always believed that if I extract it from a bee hive and it's a sweet liquid that bees have gathered and developed from floral sources, it's "honey."

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

Ian, if i brought up that the Pure Honey lable was True at the club meeting they would laugh me out of the building.

I understand what your saying, until you make the point that it is the pasteurization that removes the pureness from it.

We sell our honey according to our flows, its how the public associates the honey types, as do the beekeepers. Never can we get 100% of a floral source, but we can get close. And so we market it as such.

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

A couple of years ago, we were invited to speak at the Fl state beekeeping meeting. They had just passed their honey standard, and part of our talk focused on the standard.
One of the issues that will have to be addressed in the future is that the FL standard allows for zero adulteration with feed According to the letter of the standard, .005% feed in the honey would make it not honey. At some point, testing will get better, and beekeepers and packers that are used to a LOD of 5% will have a problem.

I think beekeepers are shooting themselves in the foot with these standards.....all the while there is plenty on the market that is demonstrably not honey....have any of these standards resulted in pulling a single jar from the shelf?

Deknow

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see. -The Grateful Dead

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

Ah, this seems very different than the initial thesis of the thread, I think. I had read the initial posts as objecting to filtration at a level that would remove pollen grains from honey. This seems to be objecting to a process that prevents crystallization while retaining the "honey" label.

I haven't tried it -- I don't know that I even want to try it -- but I suspect that honey filtered so it is absolutely free of pollen grains will still crystallize eventually. The period of time that it remains liquid may be extended, but I don't know that such filtration will prevent it from crystallizing "forever."

After all, it seems to me that HFCS will also crystallize. Does that make it "honey?" I think not. But I would not use "crystallizes/does not crystallize" as a single criterion to define "honey."

To return to the point, I presume from the thesis statement in post #233 that you believe that heating past some point converts "honey" into something other than "honey." At what point does that occur? What sorts of inclusions are necessary to meet the definition? How can honey be identified? What sorts of characteristics define "honey?"

Re: Tests Show Most Store Honey Isnít Honey

As far as the ethics of calling honey that has been extracted, heated, filtered and bottled, "honey," rather than terming it something different, I have no difficulty with the term "milk" for a product that has been processed along similar lines or "water" as I suggested above. Any number of other examples are similar, I suspect.